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Thursday 12 October 2006

Ping Google Blog Search via Feedburner






I recently posted about Google's introduction of a ping service for their BlogSearch.

If you use the free Feedburner service for your blog feeds (which I do in order to give my readers a choice of full or shorter feeds, whether RSS or Atom), well they've now added some enhancements including the ability to ping Blog Search automatically via Feedburner's PingShot. This means that when your feed updates, Feedburner will automatically notify the chosen ping servers (which now includes Blog Search).

To activate PingShot, login to Feedburner, go to the Publicise tab for the relevant feed, choose PingShot on the left (see Feedburner's screenshot), tick the services to be automatically notified by Feedburner (as many as possible of course!), choose up to 5 extra services via the dropdown (select the name then click the Add button), and click Save (and Activate, if you haven't already):

As you'll see they've now added Blog Search to the dropdown list. I've added it to my own list, which will save me pinging Blog Search separately when I update my blog (yeah, even avoiding one extra click is worth it for me!). But remember you still have to ping Google Sitemaps independently to get your updated content re-indexed by Google's main (non-blog) search service, though they should pick up the changed feed eventually.

(Feedburner's blog post also outlines some other improvements they've made like more new FeedFlares).

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